Mohamad Bzeek has taken in terminally ill children for the past 20 years, the only one to do so in LA county

World Bulletin / News Desk

Mohammad Bzeek's bravery is nothing short of incredible. A widowed immigrant has spent the past twenty years looking after terminally ill children.

For now he is spending his days and nights caring for a bedridden 6-year-old foster girl with a rare brain defect. Blind and deaf she has daily seizures and arms and legs are paralyzed.

Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim who lives in Azusa, just wants her to know she’s not alone in this life.

“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” he said speaking to the LA times “I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”

There is a shortage in the foster system for people like Mohammad Bzeek and up till now he has been the only one to fill the void.

“If anyone ever calls us and says, ‘This kid needs to go home on hospice,’ there’s only one name we think of,” said Melissa Testerman, a DCFS intake coordinator who finds placements for sick children. “He’s the only one that would take a child who would possibly not make it.”

“These kids, it’s a life sentence for them,” he said.

Bzeek, 62, is a portly man with a long, dark beard and a soft voice. The oldest of 10 children,he came to this country from Libya as a college student in 1978.

Some years later through a mutual friend, he met a woman named Dawn, who he married. She had become a foster parent in the early 1980s, before she met husband. Inspired by her grandparents and before she met Bzeek, she had opened her home as an emergency shelter for foster children who needed immediate placement or who were placed in protective custody. Stress caused friction in the marriage and they split in 2013 - she died a year later after she had become very ill, with seizures leaving her weak for days after.

“The key is, you have to love them like your own,” Bzeek said recently. “I know they are sick. I know they are going to die. I do my best as a human being and leave the rest to God.”

Bzeek’s only biological son, Adam, was born in 1997 with brittle bone disease and dwarfism. So fragile that changing his diaper or his socks could break his bones. Now 19, he studies computer science and gets around the home in a makeshift skateboard that his father built for him out of an ironing board. Bzeek has always been open around the situation of those he brought in, and with his wife have told him that they would eventually die.

“I love my sister,” the shy teenager said of the foster girl. “Nobody should have to go through so much pain.”

On a Saturday in early December, Bzeek, Adam and the girl’s nurse, Marilou Terry, had a celebratory lunch for the child’s sixth birthday. He invited her biological parents. They didn’t come.

Bzeek crouched in front of the girl — wearing a long, red-and-white dress and matching socks — and held her hands, clapping them together.